Notes: July 2017

The highlight for July was the opportunity to emcee a poetry reading by Jill Jones and Jerome Rothenberg at The Wheatsheaf Hotel, Thebarton, on Thursday, 20 July. I’m a long-time proponent of the two-volume anthology, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry(University of California Press, 1998), edited by Jerome and Pierre Joris. Poems for the Millennium, described by Publishers Weekly as a ‘gatecrasher’ of an anthology for its contravening of aesthetic and national boundaries, covers the Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude period (Volume 1), and the Postwar to Millennium period (Volume 2).

In practical terms, it’s a challenging anthology for new readers of poetry, but an invaluable working anthology for poets due to the breadth of its content, including selections from the forerunners to Modernism, the various ‘-isms’ of Twentieth Century literature (e.g. Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Objectivism, Dada), translations of French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and South American literature, as well as selections of concrete, sound and oral poetry, Language poetry, and a gesturing towards cyber-poetics.

At any rate, it was an excellent reading, and well attended. Jill read from her recent books of poetry, including The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014) and Brink (Five Islands Press, 2017). The latter will be launched by Peter Goldsworthy at The Wheatsheaf on Wednesday, 2 August. You can find details for Jill’s launch here.

Finally, I read – with some interest – the Australia Council for the Arts’ Connecting Australians: Results of the National Arts Participation Survey (June 2017). These are the extracts that pertain to poetry:

‘One in five Australians participated in creative writing in 2016 (20%), up from 16% in 2013 and 2009. The increase is driven by increased participation in writing poetry, plays and creative non-fiction. A contingent of Australians use social media as a platform for creative writing, and the increase may reflect the popularity of blogs and other inherently social forms of creative writing.’ (69)

‘Eight in ten Australians read creative writing in 2016 (79%) down from nine in ten in 2013 (87%), and eight in ten in 2009 (83%), with declines in the proportion of Australians reading novels, poetry, creative non-fiction and short stories. This decline in reading can be attributed to Australians’ increasingly busy lives, increased time spent on social media, and the proliferation of entertainment options …’ (74)

‘Poetry has declined in popularity (14%), after a peak in 2013 (26%).’ (74)

‘Females are more likely to read creative writing (83%) than males (74%). This is particularly true for novels with 69% of Australian females reading novels compared to 53% of males. This is also the case for poetry, with 17% of females reading poetry compared to 12% of males.’ (76)